Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl announced the city has successfully transitioned its email service from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for Government. According to the announcement, the city will save an estimated 25 percent in email support costs. “Adopting Google Apps aligns with our goals to utilize the best, most innovative technology in order to modernize [...]
Four charts from Google Public Data Explorer summarize how U.S. state governments are trending with respect to finances. Despite all odds, however, liquor stores continue to hold their own when it comes to generating revenue. Revenue All amounts of money received by a government from external sources–net of refunds and other correcting transactions–other than from [...]
Code for America made a number of announcements Wednesday that will have a big impact on the organization’s work in 2012 and potentially the future of government technology.
Google announced the launch of YouTube for Government with a simple landing page and playlist of examples of how elected officials and government is using its video platform.
Open Source for America launched a new video campaign to promote the benefits of government using open source technology. The video includes business leaders from Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and Google.
The U.S. Army is set to launch My.Army.Mil. The site is Army’s “official user-customized homepage featuring Army news, information and media from around the globe.”
From the press release:
After visitors sign-in and authenticate with Google Friend Connect (AIM, Google, Yahoo and OpenID) or AKO (Army Knowledge Online), they will be prompted to add and arrange a series of widgets to suit their specific information needs. Powering these widgets are open source technologies such as JQuery, PHP, MySQL and API integration.
Featured widgets include:
- An All Services widget with feeds from the Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy
- Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube widgets that sync with many Army organizations
- My Army News widget with customized feeds from Commands, Corps, Divisions, Installations, and traditional news sections
- A Features widget highlighting stories of Valor, Army events, history and heritage
- AKO (Army Knowledge Online) widget to log-in to AKO
- Video widget with official Army videos, newscasts and raw footage
- RSS widget that can pull multiple feeds from external sites
Sunlight Labs has joined with Mozilla, Google, Redhat, Fedora, Open Source for America and Code for America to promote the Great American Hackathon. The two-day event, December 12-13, aims to “to solve as many open government problems as we can with as many hackathons across the country as possible.”
A ‘glass half full’ view of government app contests
An increasing number of people are starting to suggest that the concept of the “app contest†(where governments challenge developers to build civic applications) is getting a bit long in the tooth.
There have been lots of musings lately about the payoff for governments that hold such contests and the long term viability of individual entries developed for these contests. Even Washington DC – the birthplace of the current government app contest craze – seems the be moving beyond the framework it has employed not once, but twice to engage local developers.